Arising out of the rebellious mood at the beginning of the twentieth
century, modernism was a radical approach that yearned to revitalize
the way modern civilization viewed life, art, politics, and science.
This rebellious attitude that flourished between 1900 and 1930 had,
as its basis, the rejection of European culture for having become
too corrupt, complacent and lethargic, ailing because it was bound
by the artificialities of a society that was too preoccupied with
image and too scared of change. This dissatisfaction with the moral
bankruptcy of everything European led modern thinkers and artists to
explore other alternatives, especially primitive cultures. For the
Establishment, the result would be cataclysmic; the new emerging
culture would undermine tradition and authority in the hopes of
transforming contemporary society.

The first characteristic associated with
modernism is nihilism, the rejection of all religious and moral
principles as the only means of obtaining social progress. In other
words, the modernists repudiated the moral codes of the society in
which they were living in. The reason that they did so was not
necessarily because they did not believe in God, although there was
a great majority of them who were atheists, or that they experienced
great doubt about the meaninglessness of life. Rather, their
rejection of conventional morality was based on its arbitrariness,
its conformity and its exertion of control over human feelings. In
other words, the rules of conduct were a restrictive and limiting
force over the human spirit. The modernists believed that for an
individual to feel whole and a contributor to the re-vitalization of
the social process, he or she needed to be free of all the
encumbering baggage of hundreds of years of hypocrisy

The rejection of moral
and religious principles was compounded by the repudiation of all
systems of beliefs, whether in the arts, politics, sciences or
philosophy. Doubt was not necessarily the most significant reason
why this questioning took place. One of the causes of this
iconoclasm was the fact that early 20th-century culture was
literally re-inventing itself on a daily basis. With so many
scientific discoveries and technological innovations taking place,
the world was changing so quickly that culture had to re-define
itself constantly in order to keep pace with modernity and not
appear anachronistic. By the time a new scientific or philosophical
system or artistic style had found acceptance, each was soon after
questioned and discarded for an even newer one. Another reason for
this fickleness was the fact that people felt a tremendous creative
energy always looming in the background as if to announce the birth
of some new invention or theory.

As a consequence of
the new technological dynamics, the modernists felt a sense of
constant anticipation and did not want to commit to any one system
that would thereby harness creativity, ultimately restricting and
annihilating it. And so, in the arts, for instance, at the beginning
of the 20th-century, artists questioned academic art for its lack of
freedom and flirted with so many isms: secessionism, fauvism,
expressionism, cubism, futurism, constructivism, dada, and
surrealism. Pablo Picasso, for instance, went as far as
experimenting with several of these styles, never wanting to feel
too comfortable with any one style.

The wrestling with all the new assumptions about reality and
culture generated a new permissiveness in the realm of the arts. The
arts were now beginning to break all of the rules since they were
trying to keep pace with all of the theoretical and technological
advances that were changing the whole structure of life. In doing
so, artists broke rank with everything that had been taught as being
sacred and invented and experimented with new artistic languages
that could more appropriately express the meaning of all of the new
changes that were occurring. The result was a new art that appeared
strange and radical to whoever experienced it because the artistic
standard had always been mimesis, the literal imitation or
representation of the appearance of nature, people, and society. In
other words, art was supposed to be judged on the standard of how
well it realistically reflected what something looked or sounded
like.

This mimetic tradition had originated
way back in ancient Greece, had been perfected during the
Renaissance, and had found prominence during the nineteenth-century.
But for modern artists this old standard was too limiting and did
not reflect the way that life was now being experienced. Freud and
Einstein had radically changed perception of reality. Freud had
asked us to look inwardly into a personal world that had previously
been repressed, and Einstein taught us that relativity was
everything. And, thus, new artistic forms had to be found that
expressed this new subjectivity. Artists countered with works that
were so personal that they distorted the natural appearance of
things and with reason. Each individual work begged to be judged as
a self-sufficient unit which obeyed its own internal laws and its
own internal logic, thereby attaining its own individual character.
No more conventional cookie-cutter forms to be superimposed on human
expression

What were some
of the artistic beliefs that the modernists adopted? Above all they
embraced freedom, and they found it in the artistic forms and emotions
of the primitive cultures of Africa, the Orient, the Americas and
Oceania. This act was the repudiation of all of the stylistic
refinements that were the basis of 19th-century artistic endeavor. On
the one hand, primitivism represented the simplification of form, which
was to become one of the hallmarks of modernism. This abstraction of
form suggested that some essential structure, previously hidden by
realistic technique, would come to light. Art had, according to the
modernists, become too concerned with irrelevant sophistications and
conventions that detracted from the main purpose of art: the
discovery of truth. On the other hand, primitivism was the
expression of all that civilized man had to repress in order to
enter into contract with society. According to Sigmund Freud's
Civilization and Its Discontents, in order for man to partake in
civilized society, he had had to lay aside many uncivilized urges
within the self, such as the natural appetite for adultery, incest,
murder, homosexuality, etc., all held as taboos. It is this
repression of natural desires that, Freud argues, is the source of
modern neurosis. As a Jew, Freud was too well acquainted with the
THOU SHALL NOTS of the Ten Commandments. Symbolically, the embrace
of primitivism is a negation of the very principles of the
Judeo-Christian tradition and an affirmation of authentic expression
of that hidden self that only finds expression at night when we
dream.

The modernist
interest in primitivism also expressed itself in its correlative,
the exploration of perversity. This obsession with the forbidden and
the lurid was tantamount to the re-discovery of passion, a way of
life which so many creative people at the time believed to have been
repressed or had lain dormant. Frederich Nietzsche blames this
dormancy on the 19th-century's preoccupation with form. In his
seminal work The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche had traced the
origins and development of drama back in Ancient Greece to the balance
that existed between two gods who existed in opposition to one another,
Apollo and Dionysius. Apollo represented the essence of light,
rationality, civility, culture, and restraint. In contrast, Dionysius
suggested wine, the primitive urge, all that was uncivilized. Although
these two gods existed in opposition to one another, they were both,
nevertheless, revered equally, thus striking a balance between form (the
Apollonian) and creative impulse (Dionysius). The modernists concurred
with Nietzsche that art had degenerated because it was too concerned
with the rules of form and not enough with the creative energies that
lie underneath the surface.

It is that exploration of what is underneath the surface that the
modernists were so keen about, and what better way to do so than to
scrutinize man's real aspirations, feelings, and actions. What was
revealed was a new honesty in this portrayal: disintegration,
madness, suicide, sexual depravity, impotence, morbidity, deception.
Many would assail this portrayal as morally degenerate; the
modernists, on the other hand, would defend themselves by calling it
liberating.

Ironically, the modernist portrayal of human
nature takes place within the context of the
city rather than in nature, where it had
occurred during the entire 19th-century. At
the beginning of the 19th-century, the
romantics had idealized nature as evidence
of the transcendent existence of God;
towards the end of the century, it became a
symbol of chaotic, random existence. For the
modernists, nature becomes irrelevant and
passť, for the city supersedes nature as the
life force. Why would the modernists shift
their interest from nature and unto the
city? The first reason is an obvious one.
This is the time when so many left the
countryside to make their fortunes in the
city, the new capital of culture and
technology, the new artificial paradise. But
more importantly, the city is the place
where man is dehumanized by so many
degenerate forces. Thus, the city becomes
the locus where modern man is
microscopically focused on and dissected. In
the final analysis, the city becomes a
"cruel devourer", a cemetery for lost souls.

The Forces
That Shaped Modernism

The year 1900 ushered a new era that changed the way that reality was
perceived and portrayed. Years later this revolutionary new period would
come to be known as modernism and would forever be defined as a time
when artists and thinkers rebelled against every conceivable doctrine
that was widely accepted by the Establishment, whether in the arts,
science, medicine, philosophy, etc. Although modernism would be
short-lived, from 1900 to 1930, we are still reeling from its influences
sixty-five years later.

How was modernism such a radical departure
from what had preceded it in the past? The
modernists were militant about distancing
themselves from every traditional idea that
had been held sacred by Western
civilization, and perhaps we can even go so
far as to refer to them as intellectual
anarchists in their willingness to vandalize
anything connected to the established order.
In order to better understand this modernist
iconoclasm, let's go back in time to explore
how and why the human landscape was changing
so rapidly.

By 1900 the world was a bustling place
transformed by all of the new discoveries,
inventions and technological achievements
that were being thrust on civilization:
electricity, the combustion engine, the
incandescent light bulb, the automobile, the
airplane, radio, X-rays, fertilizers and so
forth. These innovations revolutionized the
world in two distinct ways. For one, they
created an optimistic aura of a worldly
paradise, of a new technology that was to
reshape man into moral perfection. In other
words, technology became a new religious
cult that held the key to a new utopian
dream that would transform the very nature
of man. Secondly, the new technology
quickened the pace through which people
experienced life on a day to day basis. For
instance, the innovations in the field of
transportation and communication accelerated
the daily life of the individual. Whereas in
the past, a person's life was circumscribed
by the lack of mechanical resources
available, a person could now expand the
scope of daily activities through the new
liberating power of the machine. Man now
became literally energized by all of these
scientific and technological innovations
and, more important, felt a rush emanating
from the feeling that he was invincible,
that there was no stopping him.

Modernity, however, was not only shaped by
this new technology. Several philosophical
theoreticians were to change the way that
modern man perceives the external world,
particularly in their refutation of the
Newtonian principle that reality was an
absolute, unquestionable entity divorced
from those observing it. The first to do so
was F. H. Bradley, who considered that the
human mind is a more fundamental feature of
the universe than matter and that its
purpose is to search for truth. His most
ambitious work, Appearance and Reality: A
Metaphysical Essay (1893), introduced the
concept that an object in reality can have
no absolute contours but varies from the
angle from which it is seen. Thus Bradley
defines the identity of a things as the view
the onlooker takes of it. The effect of this
work was to encourage rather than dispel
doubt. In one of the most seminal works of
this century, "On the Electrodynamics of
Moving Bodies," Albert Einstein's theory of
relativity held that, if, for all frames of
reference, the speed of light is constant
and if all natural laws are the same, then
both time and motion are found to be
relative to the observer. In other words,
there is no such thing as universal time and
thus experience runs very differently from
man to man. Alfred Whitehead was another who
revised the ideas of time, space and motion
as the basis of man's perception of the
external world. He viewed reality as living
geometry and believed in the essential
relevance of every object to all other
objects: "all entities or factors in the
universe are essentially relevant to each
other's existence since every entity
involves an infinite array of perspectives."
For all of these thinkers, subjectivity was
now the main focus.

Several psychological theoreticians were to
also fundamentally alter the way that modern
man viewed his own internal reality, an
unexplored heart of darkness. Sigmund Freud
was the first to gaze inwardly and to
discover a world within where dynamic, often
warring forces shape the individual's psyche
and personality. To explain this internal
world within each of us, he developed a
complex theory of the unconscious that
illustrated the importance of unconscious
motivation in behavior and the proposition
that psychological events can go on outside
of conscious awareness. And so, according to
Freud, fantasies, dreams, and slips of the
tongue are outward manifestations of
unconscious motives. Furthermore, in
explaining the development of personality,
Freud expanded man's definition of sexuality
to include oral, anal, and other bodily
sensations. Thus his legacy to the modern
world was to expose a darker side of man
that had been hidden from view by the
hypocrisy of 19th- century society.

Freud was not the only psychological
theoretician who asked us to gaze inwardly
to better understand the human psyche. His
disciple, Carl Jung, was also to develop
another theory delving into the unconscious
which explored the nature of the irrational
self and which explained the common grounds
shared by so many cultures. Jung's Theory of
the Collective Unconscious, about an area of
the mind that he believed was shared by
everyone, states that there are patterns of
behavior or actions and reactions of the
psyche which he calls archetypes that are
determined by race. These instinctive,
universal patterns manifest themselves in
dreams, visions, and fantasies and are
expressed in myths, religious concepts,
fairy tales, and works of art.

The French philosopher Henry Bergson
was also to turn his gaze to the unconscious to explore the nature
of memory as experienced in the present moment. Bergson's Time and
the Free Will was an attempt to establish the notion of duration, or
lived time, as opposed to what he viewed as the spatialized
conception of time measured by the clock and commonly known as
chronological time. According to Bergson, states of conscious memory
permeate one another in storage within the unconscious, in the same
way that "oldie-goldies" are stored in a juke-box. A sense
impression, such as whiff of cologne or the taste of sweet potato
pie, might trigger consciousness to recall one of these memories,
much like a coin will cause the record of your choice to play. Once
the submerged memory resurfaces in the conscious mind, the self
becomes suspended, there might be a spontaneous flash of intuition
about the past, and just maybe, this insight will translate into
some kind of realization of the present moment. In fact, isn't this
what we do when we listen to an old song, forget the present,
re-experience the past, and, then, all of a sudden, apply it all to
our lives in the present? And thus, intuition leads to knowledge.

Politics and the economy would also
transform the way that modern man looked at himself and the world in
which he lived. Science and technology were radically changing the
means of production. Whereas in the past, a worker became involved
in production from beginning to end, by 1900 he had become a mere
cog in the production line, making an insignificant contribution.
Thus, division of labor made him feel fragmented, alienated not only
from the rest of society but from himself. One of the effects of
this fragmentation was the consolidation of workers into political
parties that threatened the upper classes. And, thus, the new
political idealism that was to culminate in the Russian Revolution
that swept through Europe.